This article is a summary of my presentation from the great Sourcing Summit that was held in Tallinn in June and in Amsterdam in October. I shared my thoughts on data visualization and how it can help to your sourcing success. There are multiple tools that can enable you to visualize data and I am going to tackle some of them in this blog post.

You might ask yourself why should you be interested in this topic. The answer is that data visualization can help you to understand various elements in your sourcing process and help you to design your sourcing strategy. The business wants us not only to deliver a top talent but also wants us to predict what is going to happen in the recruitment process and why. Data Visualization can also help you to reveal patterns & trends. Another advantage is the simplification of the information.

There are multiple data that you can visualize including data from your ATS, Keywords and various connections among them, search results, data from your social networks and last but not least the labour market. Let's take a look at each of these cases.

I use the following tools for the data visualization - Linkedin Recruiter Search insights, Search Explorer, Kumu, Tableau, Google Trends and Pin Leads.

1.Keyword Visualization

Below you can see an example of the word Javascript and how is it interpreted by Search Explorer:

Let's keep aside for a while that you know that javascript is associated with jQuery and other displayed technologies. All of these words on the screenshot are clickable and the whole infographic will adjust according to your clicks and connection among these keywords. You are able to reveal very quickly which keywords are related to each other and how the semantic connection works. This tool is very useful if you get a new project and you are not so much familiar with the terminology.

2.Linkedin Network Visualization

Do you want to visualize your Linkedin data and see where most of your connections are working and what their profession is? You can use Kumu to visualize your Linkedin network. You can see on the left side how my network looks like. The whole process is very simple. You just upload a csv file with your connections from Linkedin and then you can play around with them in Kumu and create various visualizations. You can highlight various connections and nods, zoom in, zoom out, filter your connections etc. This process is very useful because we as sourcers sometimes don't know how our network looks like from the global perspective, especially in the case when our network is too big. Kumu can answer most of the questions that you ask yourself regarding your own Linkedin network.

3. Data from your ATS

This topic is for a separated article because it's more complexed in terms of creating the data model. Each company uses a different ATS, technologies etc. If you want to visualize data from your ATS you can either use internal reporting/infographics or you can use tools like Tableau which is for free with some limited features. Most of the modern ATS solutions use some kind of web data connector which will enable you to connect ATS to Tableau. Web data connector is in this case just a web link that is generated by the administrator of your ATS. In the case that your ATS does not offer you some reporting, you can create beautiful reports and again to see some connections, trends that you might have omitted in your data analysis.

4. Data from your searches

Below you can see a screenshot from my presentation in Tallinn. It displays search results from Google Trends. I asked Google to show me the search trends on these 3 companies in Estonia. This process is very useful when you want to know some facts about a specific market which you are not familiar with. The same approach can be applied to job titles. You can notice increasing or decreasing tendency and estimate the "popularity" also in various counties of the same country.

5. Visualization of your Linkedin research results

It's interesting that the feature Linkedin search insights is still one of the underutilized features in Linkedin Recruiter. (update: it is not accessible in the new LIR UI) If you have a Linkedin Recruiter license you should check out the data before starting to engage your talent. You can see on the screenshot below how the IT market in Estonia looks like. You can see that Linkedin brought me almost 8000 results even including typos and Estonian variants of these keywords. All of these bars are clickable so when you click on the "past company" you can see where people are going to work. You can check out which university in the country produces the most graduates or which location is the best for your hiring activities.

When you are mapping your desired market you want to collect also some of the valuable information for example like email addresses. I use Pin Leads for these activities. You just install a chrome extension and run your search on Google.com and Pin Leads will send you working email addresses of employees who are working in these companies. You can see it on the screenshot on the left side. This process is very simple and you can have an overview of the targeted market very quickly. Alternatively, you can also select only some of these companies which you are interested in. Pin Leads is not solely for free but if you need to find out some of the information this is definitely the place to go to.

There are multiple other tools that you can use for visualizing your data so this article is definitely not exhaustive. What other tools do you use?